unity-design team mailing list archive

[Ted Gould <ted@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 2009-05-09 at 22:19 +0300, Natan Yellin wrote:

> Mike is sitting at his computer and working in Inkscape when several
> emails arrive. In the past, Mike has clicked on the indicator icon to
> get rid of the dot but has always ignored the messages themselves.
> Therefore, the emails are assigned low priority and the icon only
> shows a green dot.
> 
> After a few minutes, Mike closes Inkscape and decides to work on his
> latest project at work. He opens up a file that a colleague emailed
> him and begins to edit it. The system notices that the tags on his
> document match the tags on one of the emails that he received, so the
> indicator icon changes to a yellow dot.
> 
> An hour later Mike receives another email and evolution automatically
> inserts the email into the global database. The notifications system
> receives is told that a new email arrived and automatically does a
> query for similar items. It notices that the document Mike is editing
> was sent to him by the same person who sent the new email. The
> indicator icon turns red to reflect this, and Mike receives a relevant
> notification.
> [End of scenario]

While I applaud Mike for using Inkscape I think that in general there is
to much "magic" in how things are working here.  For instance, why the
dot changed color is not obvious to the user, it basically becomes "the
computer thinks it has something for me."  Chances are, that it won't be
100% accurate, so people will tend to ignore it over time.

I think that what might be more interesting is to look at displaying the
tags in a document and allowing the user to explore based on those.
That way the user is driving and exploring those relationships.  It
isn't as good from the technology demo perspective, but it would keep
the user feeling in control, and understand better where misses occur
from.

		--Ted

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